terrorism
mikethemadbiologist | October 12, 2008If Obama has a 'Ayers problem', why doesn't McCain have a 'G. Gordon Liddy problem?' From Jamison Foser:
G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy served four and a half
years in prison for his role in the break-ins at the Watergate and at Daniel
Ellsberg's psychologist's office. He has acknowledged preparing to kill someone
during the Ellsberg break-in "if
necessary." He
plotted to kill journalist Jack Anderson. He plotted with a "gangland
figure" to murder Howard Hunt in order to thwart an investigation. He plotted to firebomb the
Brookings Institution. He
used Nazi terminology to outline a plan to kidnap "…
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2008This is a good start:
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) plans to publish in peer-reviewed journals much of the scientific evidence it used to pin the 2001 anthrax attacks on microbiologist Bruce Ivins....
In lieu of expert witnesses and cross-examinations, the FBI plans to offer the evidence for peer review and will keep much of the data quiet until they are published. FBI laboratory director Chris Hassell anticipates a dozen or so papers related to the case, in addition to those that have already been published. However, Hassell says, some details of the investigation will remain…
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2008Yesterday, I mentioned my doubts about there being two anthrax strains used in the 2001 attacks. Thanks to an article identified by reader TomJoe, I'm convinced that there was only one anthrax strain involved, if the only evidence for the existence of two strains is that there is a DNA inversion.
Just to remind everyone, this is what I mean by a DNA inversion:
In many bacteria, inversions are used as regulatory mechanisms--when the DNA is in one direction, nearby genes are turned on, and when in the other, they're turned off. Like so (this is a made up example for illustrative purposes only…
mikethemadbiologist | August 6, 2008In reading this NY Times story about the anthrax investigation, this statement about how the presence of an inversion (a region of flipped DNA) puzzled me (italics mine):
The genome of various stocks of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks were almost identical in all the 5 million chemical letters of their DNA. But researchers found enough differences in the attack strain to provide a reasonable chance of identifying its source.
The chief difference was that a stretch of DNA was flipped head to tail in some bacteria in the attack strain, but not in any other samples.
Further, the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2008Glenn Greenwald asks a lot of good questions about the recent turns in the anthrax case. I'll get to Greenwald's specific questions at the end of the post, but all of Greenwald's questions could have innocuous answers.
At this point, however, one would be a fool to, at least, not consider that something nefarious is going on--the only time I've been wrong about the Bush administration is when I've thought, "No, they couldn't do that." Over at Pissed on Politics, here's one vein of off-the-wall speculation (italics mine):
Ok, here is what I think happened: Some persons in the bowels of our…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2008Glenn Greenwald's recent post about the botched anthrax investigation reminds me of a colleague who was investigated by the FBI after the anthrax attacks (and check out the letter claiming that Bruce Ivins was yet another scientist wrongfully accused).
When I heard that he was under investigation, I was shocked: he is one of the nicer scientists I know. Ultimately, he was cleared, and in a bizarre reversal, the government asked him for help in typing the anthrax strain.
The reason I bring this up is not to demonstrate that the FBI couldn't investigate its way out of a paper bag, but to note…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2008More DHS follies. In this case, what we have here is a failure to communicate. From a Californian living near the wildfires (the good folks at skippy don't like capital letters):
we've been out of power here since about 7:00 p.m. this evening. we just finally got back up. 140,000 people were hit by this outage. try as i might, i could not get any information from the radio. all that was on was baseball games, right wing radio bloviating and a replay of larry king live.
which does beg the question...if the "terrorists" attack, will you ever know...because our emergency information system…
mikethemadbiologist | July 5, 2008...stop rapists over here. Because fighting them over there isn't working out so well. If DHS, which was supposed to protect us from terrorism, can go after intellectual property theft, certainly rape falls under its purview.
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2008In this truly depressing article about journalists and business people who are having their laptops seized by the Department of Homeland Security (the most Orwellian sounding U.S. government agency EVAH!), I came across this (italics mine):
The security value of the program is unclear, critics say, while the threats to business and privacy are substantial. If drives are being copied, customs officials are potentially duplicating corporate secrets, legal records, financial data, medical files, and personal E-mails and photographs as well as stored passwords for accounts from Netflix to Bank of…
revere | April 24, 2008The art professor is finally cleared but a distinguished biologist was still punished by a ridiculous, mindless, cruel and utterly reckless use of raw power by the Bush administration:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
Judge Richard J. Arcara of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo ruled that the indictment against the professor, Steven J. Kurtz, was "…
revere | April 4, 2008The Global War on Terror is claiming yet another victim: the reputation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey as a principled guardian of the Rule of Law. Even before joining the Bush administration Mukasey was forgetting the meaning of the word "torture," and since being confirmed is equally benighted regarding privacy. Now he is peddling shoddy goods linking terrorism and software piracy. Does this former judge have no shame? Via Preston Gralla at Computer World Blogs:
In a talk last week before at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Mukasey used his best fearmongering tactics to link software…
revere | March 30, 2008Homeland security is a priority for the Bush administration. I know that because they keep telling us. We have to take off our shoes and take out our identification getting on and off planes. Not just any identification, either. Official stuff. And crossing borders -- any borders, even the border from Canada -- now requires a passport. A passport! Perhaps one of the most highly prized and secure of all official forms of identification, too, now embedded with electronic chips. Even blank passports are expensive, and we are charged for them -- $100, up from $60 ten years ago. Which makes…
revere | March 29, 2008If you are so paranoid you have trouble sleeping, the Quantum Sleeper is just the thing for you. It's a bed made to protect you from biological and chemical terrorist attacks, natural disasters (tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes), kidnappers/stalkers and features bulletproof "saferoom" protection (hat tip Boingboing).
The basic Quantum Sleeper unit consists of an aluminum bed frame and headboard with polycarbonate, bullet proof plating that is designed to provide a protective barrier (shielding) between a perpetrator or environmental condition and the homeowners or occupants.
The…
mikethemadbiologist | March 6, 2008...if he weren't a fucking moron. One of the books that has gone missing in all of the criticisms of Jonah Goldberg's ridiculous Democrat-bashing screed Liberal Fascism is Wolfgang's Schivelbusch's Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939.
Schivelbusch correctly notes (as does Goldberg) that were similarities among the U.S., Germany, and Italy between 1933-1939: the state did become more involved in the economy, there was state propaganda--which was informed by what people wanted (at least superficially), and each society was…
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2008Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox is a powerful and detailed examination of the widely-supported terrorism in the post-Civil War South. Because Budiansky cites a lot of primary literature, such as newspaper editorials, legal testimony, and published memoirs, the horror and the nauseating race hatred of that era are not hidden with euphemisms. Were it up to me, this book would be required reading in every high school history class. And it is relevant to today's politics.
Why?
Because the Southern Strategy is beginning to fail: that is, the bogus notions of…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2008I've criticized Democratic Congressman Reyes before, so it's worth noting when he gets something right. Here's a letter Reyes wrote to Little Lord Pontchartrain:
Dear Mr. President:
The Preamble to our Constitution states that one of our highest duties as public officials is to "provide for the common defence." As an elected Member of Congress, a senior Member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I work everyday to ensure that our defense and intelligence capabilities remain strong in the face of serious threats to our…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2008Because they don't understand stuff. To wit, Mike Allen in The Politico:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail traffic of suspected terrorists, expires on Friday. After that, any monitoring that's currently authorized could continue, but no new surveillance could begin.
Actually, what is set to expire is the Protect America Act ('PAA'). The reason the PAA is set to expire is that the retroactive immunity provisions for law-breaking companies in the new PAA are opposed by the Democrats, but the Republicans refuse to pass a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2008According to the NY Times' John Tierney, post-Sept. 11th fear of terrorism might be detrimental to one's health:
But worrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people's fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely…
revere | January 16, 2008Another one of those stories about what is truly, a technological marvel: shrinking a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer down to the size of an iPod, with the target size being that of a matchbox. Designed by MIT engineers, the device which can analyze the air for hazardous gases (and could be adapted for other media like water) is touted as a possible distributed sensor for water supplies to protect us against chemical attacks or in subway systems to warn of terrorist attacks. I think this is bullshit and I'll explain why after a description of this ingenious device:
Their detector uses gas…
revere | January 12, 2008Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff often seems mystified that the public doesn't want to be protected as much as he wants to protect them. Maybe a look at the record of the protectors will provide some clue. Protectors like the Transporation Security Administration (TSA), the lovable airport screeners that have done so much to make air travel a tiring and tiresome pain in the ass.
TSA makes mistakes. Quite often, it appears. Some of those mistakes can be pretty onerous. If your name gets on a no-fly list you are in for a heap of inconvenience -- or worse. But, as we were assured by TSA…